New York Times bestseller Cory Doctorow’s The Bezzle is a high stakes thriller where the lives of the hundreds of thousands of inmates in California’s prisons are traded like stock shares.
The year is 2006. Martin Hench is at the top of his game as a self-employed forensic accountant, a veteran of the long guerrilla war between people who want to hide money, and people who want to find it. He spends his downtime on Catalina Island, where scenic, imported bison wander the bluffs and frozen, reheated fast food burgers cost $25. Wait, what? When Marty disrupts a seemingly innocuous scheme during a vacation on Catalina Island, he has no idea he’s kicked off a chain of events that will overtake the next decade of his life.
Martin has made his most dangerous mistake yet: trespassed into the playgrounds of the ultra-wealthy and spoiled their fun. To them, money is …
New York Times bestseller Cory Doctorow’s The Bezzle is a high stakes thriller where the lives of the hundreds of thousands of inmates in California’s prisons are traded like stock shares.
The year is 2006. Martin Hench is at the top of his game as a self-employed forensic accountant, a veteran of the long guerrilla war between people who want to hide money, and people who want to find it. He spends his downtime on Catalina Island, where scenic, imported bison wander the bluffs and frozen, reheated fast food burgers cost $25. Wait, what? When Marty disrupts a seemingly innocuous scheme during a vacation on Catalina Island, he has no idea he’s kicked off a chain of events that will overtake the next decade of his life.
Martin has made his most dangerous mistake yet: trespassed into the playgrounds of the ultra-wealthy and spoiled their fun. To them, money is a tool, a game, and a way to keep score, and they’ve found their newest mark—California’s Department of Corrections. Secure in the knowledge that they’re living behind far too many firewalls of shell companies and investors ever to be identified, they are interested not in the lives they ruin, but only in how much money they can extract from the government and the hundreds of thousands of prisoners they have at their mercy.
A seething rebuke of the privatized prison system that delves deeply into the arcane and baroque financial chicanery involved in the 2008 financial crash, The Bezzle is a sizzling follow-up to Red Team Blues.
Someone will like this; I'm glad it exists; but I shouldn't have wasted my time reading it and idk why I'm going to read the next one.
2 stars
Considerably more tolerable than the last, but the bar is very very low. I hate Martin Hench. If he was a real person I'd be glad for his work and try to never interact or hear from him. Also, Christ, these books are awful to read as a class conscious vegan. So much meat! Doctorow's best fiction is Walkaway and that book is incredible ! Read it instead.
I love this concept of "bezzle". How does a hamburger pyramid scheme relate to the California prison system? It's great fun learning, while the very sobering reality is not minimized in the slightest.
Content warning
No specific spoilers, but commentary which you might want to avoid if you want to read it wholly fresh.
Doctorow knew he was on to something when he came up with Marty Hench, and he was right.
Red Team Blues was Hench's last case, so this is an earlier one - set across more than a decade from the mid-2000s to the late teens. It includes Doctorow at his expositional best - wrapping explainers on class crime, financial crime, and corruption in light tissues of noir thriller in a way that will be leave your blood boiling and your guts churning with how despicable and unjust are the systems in which people are caught up in the States (in particular, California). (The particular problems associated with privatised prison systems are likely specific to the US, though general points about corruption in the legal and carceral systems are probably a bit more general.)
Hench himself keeps that same aura of competence porn and bloody-mindedness that makes him an appealing noir detective, and the pettiness and venality of his opponents I guess will likely be unavoidable across all of the stories we're likely to see here.
Doctorow presents an uncomfortable ending which was not supposed to satisfy, but to me was a little too weak on a key aspect such that it didn't quite land. All in all though, a good example of Doctorow doing what he does well.
"The Bezzle" (2024) is the latest fiction by Cory Doctorow. It's a clever and very relevant page-turning political tech thriller.
It's the second book featuring protagonist Martin Hench, a kind of digital detective who uncovers intricate corporate scams. The first was "Red Team Blues" (2023).
It's a prequel, even better than the previous one. It begins at the time of the internet bubble at the end of the 90s and goes up to the mid-2000s. The central plot involves the corrupt privatisation of the US prison system (which actually took place), creating a horrific techno-dystopian incarceration that would cause envy for today's big techs.
It's one of those books that's hard to put down, even though it lays descriptions even of the lustre of a tie or the filling of an unusual sandwich (makes you hungry).
As a bonus, there are some tasty psychedelic adventures. …
"The Bezzle" (2024) is the latest fiction by Cory Doctorow. It's a clever and very relevant page-turning political tech thriller.
It's the second book featuring protagonist Martin Hench, a kind of digital detective who uncovers intricate corporate scams. The first was "Red Team Blues" (2023).
It's a prequel, even better than the previous one. It begins at the time of the internet bubble at the end of the 90s and goes up to the mid-2000s. The central plot involves the corrupt privatisation of the US prison system (which actually took place), creating a horrific techno-dystopian incarceration that would cause envy for today's big techs.
It's one of those books that's hard to put down, even though it lays descriptions even of the lustre of a tie or the filling of an unusual sandwich (makes you hungry).
As a bonus, there are some tasty psychedelic adventures.
Cory, for those who don't know, as well as being a respected and popular speculative fiction writer, also works and writes non-fiction in the area of digital rights.
A long windy preaching road that is still kind of fun
3 stars
Not nearly as good as book one, however, still enjoyable, and a decent adventure. You gotta get through part one though it goes on for a long while. it’s all about rich people behaving poorly and the set up absolutely pays off. But it is a substantial set up.
I learned a bunch about financial crime, I learned a bunch about the prison system, I learned a bunch about rich people. I’m still excited for book three, but I hope it learns its lessons from book two.
It starts slow, but this thriller becomes special once the protagonist is taking on the prison industrial complex, with commentary on DRM and financial fraud thrown in for good measure.
